Alliana Wastia
Doctor Alliana 'Ally' Wastia, D.Sc., also known to the Travesti and Mi-Go as The Sorceress, The Bender, Miss Wibbly-Wobbly, The One Who Must Not Know, She Who Escaped, The Lost Child, and The Forgetful Warrior, is a former member of Axel Erachin's gang, the (retired) pilot of junker HMV Lord of the Artichokes, the current CEO of Hayakawa Technologies, wife of galaxy-famous author Haken Wastia and mother of Tony Award-winning Stage Actor Brayden Wastia. Often regarded as one of if not the most brilliant woman in Mjolnir, Ally's made the quite the rise since her youth on board a nomadic mining vessel to become absurdly wealthy woman with a fittingly quirky family and the respect (as well as the unquestioned fear) of the galaxy's scientific community. Biography Childhood Ally's roots could hardly be simpler; both of her parents miners aboard a hulking old tub named the SS Kasmod, a kilometer-long mining vessel that a dozen families had called home for several generations when Alliana came into the 'verse. Like all the other couples on board, Joesph and Maria Mikalovich had a quaint little pack of kids, Ally the second out of four. Their intent was to raise her just as they'd been brought up; like decent folk who worked hard for their living mining ore out on the edge of civilization. Nothing glamorous or terribly lucrative, but a living nonetheless. But from her infant days, it was clear Ally had some... quirks about her. By the age of two she had already created a great deal of stress for her parents with her seemingly nonsensical tantrums, difficulties communicating in any legible form and obsession with drawing extremely unusual geometric patterns all over anything and everything she could. The ship's 'doctor', little more than a smarter-than-average miner with some basic medical training, guessed that she was merely an odd kid, never even considering that she might have a developmental disorder. For the next two years her parents could do nothing more than attempt to ramp up the discipline in hopes of curbing her erratic behavior, ultimately to no avail. When she finally entered into the vessel's equivalent of preschool, Ally was a full-on recluse, refusing to interact with any of the children around her and unable to hold any sort of normal conversation. The first days of her education filled both her parents with worry, especially when it was discovered she had stolen a textbook from the teacher. Just as they prepared to discipline her severely for it, however, said teacher came to their quarters and noticed an odd pattern in the new geometric shapes she had begun drawing since stealing the math book. After a few weeks of carefully working with the young girl, the teach determined that there was, in fact, a coherent system of symbols she was using to represent numbers. A little more digging allowed him to not only categorize what number each shape represented, but also led to a very surprising discovery-some of the other shapes were symbols for algebraic operations. Within a week of snatching the textbook, Ally had taught herself the full gamut of mathematics all the way up to a junior high school level at only four years old. Such a find naturally shocked most who knew the girl, many having simply assumed she was retarded and would be unable to learn anything beyond a kindergartner's level. Frustratingly, however, she stubbornly refused to pay attention in class and appeared deficient in all other subjects; it was only when teaching herself to translate complex arithmetic into her curious system of shapes that Ally's genius shone through. Now aware of the brilliant mind her social dysfunction was hiding, however, her teacher became determined to help the poor girl realize her incredible potential. For the sake of her education, he advised her parents that she should be taken out of regular schooling, given the materials to taught herself and lightly nudged in the direction of self-enlightenment. It was a bittersweet solution, allowing her to bury herself in books and learn on her own, at the cost of never forcing her to try and function socially. Joesph almost pulled her back into the normal school several times as she became increasingly reclusive, only stopped by Maria's insistence that her daughter simply wasn't made to sit in a class and learn from anyone else. Her assertion certainly had justifications-Ally was brighter and better educated than most college students by the age of ten, a likely candidate to be declared a prodigy had she been from a higher-income rung of society. Out on the edge of anything resembling civilization, however, she was relegated to being an unusually smart kid who would still be little more than an engineer working to keep their bucket running. Then she found Arty. Young Adulthood The old mech had been rusting for years in the back cargo room of the vessel, waiting to be torn apart into individual parts and sold for scrap. Yet the first time a twelve-year-old Ally laid eyes on the lonely heap, sitting helplessly and begging to be restored to it's useful days of yore, it was as if she'd fallen in love. For a week she pleaded desperately with the captain, trying harder than at any point in her life to come off as a semi-stable human being to make sure the old boy wasn't simply discarded and forgotten. Admiring her passion for saving the junker and knowing she was easily the brightest kid on the ship, the captain belayed his orders that the mech be disassembled and allowed her to take ownership of it, on the grounds that she obtain new components and perform repairs herself. Wholeheartedly agreeing, Ally soon began spending all her free time tinkering with the old heap and bargaining with the engineers to get all the replacement parts needed to restore her new hobby to functionality. After years of doing little more than sitting in her room with textbooks, teaching herself everything and tinkering with every mechanical device she could get a hold of, the preteen was ecstatic to have a goal she felt passionately about achieving. For the first time in her life, the normally erratic and withdrawn young girl softened into a kind, almost outgoing young woman who loved working long into the night on jury-rigging Arty back to the proud state he had once been in. Work on Arty kept Ally busy and content all through her teenage years; when adulthood finally came, the old boy had ended up ugly as sin thanks to a hodgepodge of replacement parts welded into him, but he was ready to load cargo and lift heavy objects once again. The next year proved to be productive and fufilling, with Ally perfectly happy to spend her days operating the mech she'd lovingly restored for as long as she lived aboard the vessel. Her parents were ecstatic to see that she might finally have found the thing that gave their daughter a sense of purpose in her otherwise tumultuous life. Arty would indeed provide Alliana with a purpose, though certainly not in ways her parents expected. As her work resotring the mech came to an end and she settled into the quiet life operating the old boy, the stress of her new job led to the tantrums that had not plagued her for years starting up again. The better part of a decade spent without any major drama and developing actual social skills came to a grinding halt as she once again became temperamental and easily agitated outside of work. Things came to a head when a coworker's chastising over setting down a load in the wrong place set Ally flying into a rage while operating her mech, tossing around cargo and very nearly crushing a dozen crewmen to death before calming down. This the captain could not tolerate-in no uncertain terms he informed Ally's parents that he had to eject her from the ship before she could kill someone in one of her angry rampages. The entire family was understandably devastated, with Alliana herself taking it hardest; for all her erratic behavior, she had genuinely loved her crewmates like family. Being suddenly forced out for behavior she couldn't even control most of the time was a betrayal that stung worse than the deepest scorpion bit ever could. Mercenary Work The one bright spot was what she was allowed to take with her; crewmen who still felt sorry for Ally convinced the captain to let her bring along not only supplies to last until she found work, but also the mech she had lovingly worked on for so many years. Keeping Arty was the only thing that kept her from breaking down entirely, her precious old machine becoming what kept her head level enough to get hired in the sole field she could think of-military contracting. Scavenging weapons to slap onto Arty's shell wasn't terribly difficult; people seemed to leave junk guns lying around, waiting for a mechanical genius like Ally to come along and jury-rig it into a potent weapon. For the next few years the lonely young woman found herself constantly working on her mech, bolting on new weapons and armor as needed and changing out the old propulsion systems for something viable in combat. As it turned out, brains matter on the battlefield a hell of a lot more than social graces; having a mind that worked like an extremely odd computer gave Ally just the edge she needed to survive as one merc team after another got tired of her irrational outbursts and occasionally obsessive behavior before landing a job with a man named Decel who she has an oddly good feeling about. Axel's gang As it turned out, Decel was not simply a brillant old billionare inventor, but also the father of Axel Erachin, the most famous mercenary in the business and Public Enemy #1 as far as the Empire was concerned. When a massive Imperial assault was launched to capture Axel, Ally ended up fighting alongside the gang out of necessity, indirectly ending up a member of the little band of troublemakers through sheer destruction of Imperial property. When the battle ended in the gang's capture and the group found itself inside an Imperial jail cell, Ally naturally proceeded to pursue a method of escape. The most logical course of action to her was to use the zipper of her jeans to cut a hole in her abdomen, reach inside, pull out the prosthetic that had replaced her spleen and haphazardly covert it into an EMP generator. Amazingly, this inane ploy actually worked in deactivating the lasers used as cell bars, and motivated Kincaid to end his charade a bit faster. While recovering from the internal trauma her harebrained surgery had caused, Ally found herself in the same hospital room as Haken Wastia, another member of Axel's gang who'd just had his legs replaced with prosthetics. The two hit it off almost instantly; right after a meeting on the Empire's pending assault of Brimstone, Ally dragged the poet off to her mech for an almost-romantic moment cut short by Princess Kanade's snide insinuations. Embarrassing though it may have been, the mechanic was irreversibly smitten with her artistic new friend. Brimstone Axel's gang played an indisputably important role in the Hydra League's defeat at Brimstone, and Ally herself caused perhaps the most famous event in the battle. While her allies busied themselves with trying to bring down Commander Fury's seemingly unstoppable HMV, the mechanic haphazardly modified a sensor module kept in Arty's massive closet of a storage compartment into a crude subspace explosive powered by the massive thermal energy available at Brimstone's core, and detonated it as the fight reached a fever pitch. Tectonic disruptions were almost instantaneous, and Axel's gang hauled ass to the planet's surface. To the surprise of even Ally herself, the subspace rift created by her makeshift bomb did not simply dissipate in time, but rapidly expanded to swallow the entire planet. The gang, and the remains of the Empire's fleet, barely escaped Brimstone's orbit in time to avoid being sucked into the black hole-esque phenomenon that took the planet's place. Battle of Homeworld Shortly after arriving back on Homeworld following the success on Brimstone, Ally was eager to start exploring all the wonderful new scientific ramifications of her new class of stellar body. Instead, she found herself desperate to comfort Haken after seeing Kanade seeming killed during the assault left him dejected and lonely. Rather than bury herself in science and technology, Ally arranged a wonderful night for them filled with fancy clothing, Shakespearean performances and hoity-toity executive restaurants. The attempt at comforting her hurting new friend quickly turned into their first date, a welcome time of romance and affection after weeks of pain and suffering. Things were only cut short as the Reclaimers staged their massive attack on Homeworld, rapidly devastating the Imperial core fleet just as the Empire set off it's final plan to deal with Axel's gang; robotic legs Haken had been granted after his own limbs were irreparably damaged became a way to hijack his brain and turn him into a psychotic killing machine hell-bent on gutting Ally. The sobbing mechanic was forced to hack apart his mechanical limbs with a katana, leaving the poet in a wheelchair but at least saving both their lives. Towards the end of the battle, as the Overlord wreaked havoc and the Forefathers neared the accomplishment of their goals, Ally took a nasty plasma blast to the chest and was thrown out from the enormous nanite mech several thousand feet up. Princess Kanade, in fact alive after Brimstone, came to their rescue just barely in time. Within seconds, however, Ally was kidnapped by a monstrous reincarnation of Commander Fury; the twisted resurrection of the Hydra League leader managed to savagely tear her arm from it's socket before Haken and Guildenstern rescued her from it's grasp and bring the unconscious engineer to safety before the massive Overlord was destroyed along with it's genocidal pilots. Settling Down Waking up some time after the battle and the Reclamation War as a whole came to an end, Ally hardly needed much time before she'd slapped together a brand new arm for herself and a lovingly crafted pair of legs for her equally new boyfriend Haken. Thanks to a rather tidy sum of money left over from their mercenary escapades, the pair was able to take a break from the constant struggle and strife of life as hired guns, enjoying the fruits of their labors in relative peace. Not long after Haken's epic novel Rise, a mildly dramatized chronicle of the Erachin Gang's tale, became the best-selling novel in galactic history and assured their lifetime financial security, Ally finally married her beloved Haken in a small and romantic ceremony near the site of their new estate. A bouncing baby boy and decades of marital bliss followed post haste. During this time Ally began to be a celebrity in her own right; while not quite as recognizable as a household name in the way her husband was, the mentions of her absolute brilliance in the last third of Rise, combined with an almost universally praised paper on trans-dimensional spatial compression theory (heavily inspired by the data gleamed from her little rift in space-time where Brimstone once was) led Alliana to overnight fame in the scientific community. At the same time she began working for Hayakawa Technologies, one of the largest corporations left standing after the fall of the Empire, starting as an aerospace engineer but accelerating thanks to her genius intellect and scientific fame to the position of Head of Engineering Design for the entire company. By the time she hit age 30, Ally was both a part of a borderline perfect, if extremely unusual, family on top of holding multiple doctorates awarded by various educational institutions and a status as one of the fastest-rising stars in Mjolnir's corporate world. Hayakawa Technologies Personality Although it's never been officially diagnosed by a medical professional, anyone who payed plenty good attention in Psych class might recognize that Ally has a high-functioning form of autism. For all the vast ability with mathematics as well as any sort of mechanical and electrical engineering, social interaction is a massive obstacle to her; on a good day, she'll merely be energetic and happy, speaking in her nonsensical little metaphor-ridden language while going about her work. On a bad day, she's incredibly erratic, setting off into a wild tantrum at things that shouldn't even inspire negative reactions and utterly unstable in her behavior. Things have improved since her younger mercenary days, however. With help from Haken in particular, Ally's hashbrained ramblings have at the very least been reduced in frequency, if not at all in their insanity. A husband without quite the same resistance to effeminate fainting that Ally possess, combined with the patience required to raise a child as well as manage the largest technology company in the galaxy, has led to Ally slowing down just a tad bit. Her subordinates at Hayakawa Technologies are all very thankful for this fact. H.M.V At first glance, Ally's prized mech, The Lord of the Artichokes, seems to be a scrap heap on legs held together by rusty bolts, duct tape and the will of the Force. At second glance, Arty still appears as such, because that's all it is-Ally restored the old junker mech from a nigh-unusable state into it's currently workable (barely) condition by replacing virtually everything on the old boy with parts scavenged from a dozen different mech graveyards off everything from front-line battle machines to broken old loaders, and dear Lord does it show. Externally, Arty looks like a haphazardly slapped-together pile of trash that just happens to be shaped like a battle mech. The legs have been sen together from the remnants of six far-outdated light mechs Ally dug out of a scrap heap, with the body of the machine has been retrofit with an overworked engine, sparking electrical systems and armor that wouldn't be rated for light infantry, let alone mech combat. And yet it holds together like a dream-Arty has survived no less than fifteen sorties with mercenaries, pirates and local crooks since Ally built him up. Whatever black magic she's worked on the scrap heap, it's created a mech that's decent in a fight, if ugly as all get out. After the end of the Reclaimer Wars, Arty served one last purpose as the altar at Ally and Haken's wedding before being put into a long-overdue retirement. Though he may as well be a scrap heap to some now that his time in battle is long over, Alliana couldn't bear the thought of ever destroying him. Until oxidation completely destroys the fabric of his support structure, Arty enjoys a quiet life with his own dedicated garage on the Wastia Estate. Connections with other characters Haken Wastia Ally first met Haken Wastia while the two were recovering from earlier injuries in the Regal's sickbay. Despite the initial awkwardness of Alliana mistaking the poet for a woman, the two were instant friends, quickly forming a strong bond over their shared quirkiness and love of classical literature. After the Assault on Brimstone, Ally took Haken out for a romantic evening in an attempt to comfort him following the supposed death of Kanade Orihana; the night's sudden descent into hell amid the devastation of Homeworld by the Reclaimers became the backdrop against which mutual feelings of attraction became clear between the pair. When Axel Erachin's gang disbanded after the battle, Haken and Ally chose to buy a house with what money they had from their mercenary work and live together. Two years later they were happily married, and soon afterwards Ally gave birth to their son Brayden. Since then Ally has settled quite comfortably into life as an adoring wife and mother at their out-of-the-way estate, content to spend her days with the little family they've built. Gyver Edged Shortly after Axel's gang arrived on Factory, Ally and Gyver met for the first time. The encounter was more or less Ally rambling about sentient dogs and trying to get the Canis to play fetch with a wrench, while Gyver shrugged it off due to thinking she was cute in a batty way. Later on, after she managed to cause severe damage to her internal organs breaking the gang out of an Imperial jail cell, the Canis spent quite some time performing impromptu surgery to save her life. While high on various painkilers, she popped out of bed and kissed him roughly as thanks before fainting. Despite the semi-romantic moment, no significant feelings developed between them, and Ally soon found herself far more interested in Haken. Nevertheless, following Gyver's death during the Battle of Homeworld, Ally genuinely missed the scruffy old war dog; she has since made sure her son is able to spend time with Gyver's half-human child, and makes a point of trying to get to Edged's grave once a year to leave him one of her many wrenches as a sort of memorial. Category:Characters